Question

In the last ten years, social media has become an important marketing communications tool for most businesses.

Discuss whether businesses that are not on any social media platforms can still establish a fruitful relationship and effectively communicate with today’s consumers.

You may use any relevant form of social media platform (online forums, blogs, etc.) to support your position.

Answer 1

Answer:

Over the last ten years, many small, medium and large scale enterprises has taken the route of social media marketing as a strategy to connect with the prospective customers. The reason behind this is that social media marketing helps in the connection of large group of customers and helps in building the brand awareness.

Most of the social media platforms including twitter and the blogs are the one where company finds large pool of customers. In view of this, various digital marketing agencies have cropped up in the market that provides specialised services of marketing on social media to the outsourcing companies.

However, the businesses who are not on the social media platform can still manage to establish the fruitful relationship and communicate effectively with the today’s customers.

Companies can share only a piece of information with the customers on the social media. Moreover, the information being shared on the social media is very limited in amount. Hence, it becomes sometimes impossible for an organisation to explain the product in detail to its customer. In order to overcome this drawback of social media, company can pay a direct visit to the customer by taking his appointment so that the executive can explain the product in detail to the customer. Sometimes paying the personal visit may help in the closure of the deal.

On social media, it is not necessary that every customer will read and look into the ads posted by the company thereby losing many potential customers. Personal meetings with the customer can help the company in acquiring business from those potential customers.

Direct communication always help in understanding the perspective of each other and over a period of time the relationship between the parties become fruitful and they start in trusting each other. This kind of marketing make the customer more brand loyal as compared to the customer who is attracted by seeing the add on social media as he/she may move to the competitor for his substitute product if the competitor would describe the add in more attractive manner.

If company is not able to communicate directly, it can connect with them through the virtual assistance and video conferencing using various applications including Skype or the group of customers can be invited to the distribution centre or any hotel in the form of mega sales drive where communication with the prospective customer can be established.

Apart from social media, there are various other modes of short communication through ads such as newspaper, magazines, ads on the public property such as trains, buses, etc. Displaying ads on these modes build brand awareness among customers and helps in establishing a stronger bond with the customer as these media are thought to be the reputed one among the customers.